Back during the cold war, Daily Mail wrote a completely made up article about communist spies infiltrating sleepy English countryside villages, and people started calling up to report the spies they have seen on the streets. It became such a big deal that the government pressured MI5 to go and do something about it, so they "captured" and kicked out of the country a dozen or so communist spies found across the landscape of Britain, to a huge fanfare and celebration in the newspapers. Only years later it came out that that operation was entirely made up too, no one was actually ever found, captured and extradited anywhere, it was entirely just to satify the government and the public(who were riled up by a completely made up story in a trash newspaper).
